Stephen Spender

Since we are what we are, what shall we be The light, and then resign it for the grave.

— Stephen Spender

Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.

— Stephen Spender

I simply had to get there.

— Stephen Spender

There is a certain justice in criticism. The critic is like a midwife — a tyrannical midwife.

— Stephen Spender

When a child, my dreams rode on your wishes,Of your rhetoric, windy of course.

— Stephen Spender

I'm struggling at the end to get out of the valley of hectoring youth, journalistic middle age, imposture, moneymaking, public relations, bad writing, mental confusion.

— Stephen Spender

History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.

— Stephen Spender

I say, stamping the words with emphasis, Drink from here energy and only energy

— Stephen Spender

Eye, gazelle, delicate wanderer, Touch, love, all senses...

— Stephen Spender

No one Our goal which we compel: Man shall be man.

— Stephen Spender

Death to the killers, bringing light to life.

— Stephen Spender

After the first powerful plain manifestoBut gliding like a queen, she leaves the station.

— Stephen Spender

Ah, like a comet through flame she moves entrancedBreaking with honey buds, shall ever equal.

— Stephen Spender

Death is another milestone on their way. How this one excelled all others in making driving belts.

— Stephen Spender

They think how one life hums, revolves and toils, One cog in a golden singing hive...

— Stephen Spender

What I had not foreseen Leaking the brightness away

— Stephen Spender

For I had expected always To save from dust

— Stephen Spender

Across this dazzling They sign: 'I AM!'

— Stephen Spender

In railway halls, on pavements near the traffic, As tides push rotten stuff along the shore.

— Stephen Spender

Paint here no draped despairs, no saddening clouds This Time forgets and never heals, far less transcends.

— Stephen Spender

At dawn she lay with her profile at that angle Which, when she sleeps, seems the carved face of an angel.

— Stephen Spender

I think continually of those who were truly great. Should tell of the spirit clothed from head to foot in song.

— Stephen Spender

What is precious is never to forget With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

— Stephen Spender

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields, And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

— Stephen Spender

More beautiful and soft than any moth Scarcely disturbing charted currents of air.

— Stephen Spender

In the last sweep of love, they pass over fields But soon are hid under the loud city.

— Stephen Spender

Then, as they land, they hear the tolling bell Religion stands, the church blocking the sun.

— Stephen Spender

Our single purpose was to walk through snowLike compass iron.

— Stephen Spender

Extensive whiteness drownedStatic, glaring days, Time's suspended blank.

— Stephen Spender

What the eye delights in, no longer dictatesOn the horizon's rim: they sign their peace, in games.

— Stephen Spender

There was a wood,I entered with myself. I left with a woman.

— Stephen Spender

History has tonguesBalancing present sky.

— Stephen Spender

The laurelled exiles, kneeling to kiss these sands. Read books as though he broke up flints.

— Stephen Spender

One, a poet, went babbling like a fountainExposed to a too violent sun.

— Stephen Spender

Let your ghost follow ever a bride:

— Stephen Spender

Whatever happens, I shall never be alone, I shall always have a fare, an affair, or a revolution.

— Stephen Spender

Of course, the entire effort is to put myselfIn the outer suburbs. Well, well, I carry on.

— Stephen Spender

Yet supposing that a bomb should diveWhich is all mystery or nothing.

— Stephen Spender

You drive the landscape like a herd of cloudsBy one glance carrying all these eyes.

— Stephen Spender

Deep in the winter plain, two armiesOn either side, except the dead, and wounded.

— Stephen Spender

All have become so nervous and so coldWhich brought him here, more terribly than bullets.

— Stephen Spender

The guns spell money's ultimate reasonHe was a better target for a kiss.

— Stephen Spender

His name never appeared in the papers.rumour, drifted outside.

— Stephen Spender

Consider his life which was valuelessLying under the olive tree, O world, O death?

— Stephen Spender

Under the olive trees, from the groundRaging with flags on the world's shore.

— Stephen Spender

Your heart was loaded with its fate like leadWhich cut their lands and killed their men.

— Stephen Spender

Your quicksilver declaiming eye Which thickened into Allies.

— Stephen Spender

To break out of the chaos of my darknessOut of my darkness into a lucid day.

— Stephen Spender

My words like eyes that flinch from light, refuseOn a circumference to avoid the centre.

— Stephen Spender

The iron arc of the avoiding journeyCentre and circumference are both my weakness.

— Stephen Spender

My single pair of eyesWhere I reflect the many, in my one.

— Stephen Spender

And if this I were destroyed,Closing, they shut me in a coffin.

— Stephen Spender

Here where I lie is the hot pitIn double sorrow.

— Stephen Spender

I wear your kiss like a featherLaid upon my cheek

— Stephen Spender

And then the heart in its white sailing prideLife, waiting for all your life to speak.

— Stephen Spender

Involved in my own entrails and a crustOne of a universe of stars and faces.

— Stephen Spender

The seen and seeing softly mutually strikeAt the back of love, the back of air, the back of light.

— Stephen Spender

You stared out of the window on the emptinessWho sees for the first time things happen.

— Stephen Spender

When you smiled,Where it had always been silverly carried.

— Stephen Spender

All the posters on the walls In the victorious hurricane.

— Stephen Spender

Far far from gusty waves these children's faces. Like rootless weeds the torn hair round their paleness.

— Stephen Spender

Surely, Shakespeare is wicked and the map a bad example So blot their maps with slums as big as doom.

— Stephen Spender

Unless, governor, teacher, inspector, visitor, History is theirs whose language is the sun.

— Stephen Spender